we’ll never, ever get far far away from Shrek

Look: Shrek Babies? A diaper-clad Donkey and a toddler Shrek and goo-goo, gah-gah in the swamp? Could someone just shoot me now? After the first Shrek flick, I might have trusted that a movie about the grumpy ogre as a baby would avoid too much cutesiness, but after the third one and its near-total abandonment of any real bite, I don’t.

Mike Mitchell (Sky High, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo) is in talks to direct the sequel from a script by Tim Sullivan.

Oh dear fairy godmother. How does the guy who directed Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo get a job in Hollywood scrubbing Paris Hilton’s pedicure pumice stone, never mind directing another film? (Mitchell also perpetrated Surviving Christmas; I’ll grant, however, that his Sky High is at least tolerably endearing.)

So there’s another major strike again Shrek Babies. Next: there are lots of Tim Sullivans listed at the IMDB, but the only one with screenwriting credits is responsible for titles like 2001 Maniacs: Beverly Hellbillys, Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror, and Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn. And someone is trusting this man with Shrek 4?

Why can’t I help but envision something like Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, which is quite possibly the worst movie ever made? After Deuce Bigalow, of course.

[DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey] “Katzenberg insists he always envisioned four chapters in the Shrek tale, and No. 4 will explore the green ogre’s origins,” the Hollywood Reporter learned during an interview with Katzenberg on Wednesday at the Cannes film festival.

Oh, you know what: that is such crap. Shrek was Katzenberg’s middle finger to Disney after he was forced out of his exec position at that studio. The film was an enormous risk that probably only a huge ego like Katzenberg’s would have chanced, and then only to get back at the Mouse. He wasn’t envisioning four films: he was envisioning not bankrupting his new company DreamWorks in the process of extending that middle finger.